Next Generation Sequencing for Food Authenticity, Traceability and Safety

Date: 28 February 2019
Time: 09:40

Food authenticity and fraud are topics of high interest in the food industry and tightly controlled by authorities and retailer codes of practice. The complexity of the food supply chain is challenging the abilities of analytical tools used for traceability of ingredients for food production. There remains significant interest in the DNA sequencing techniques to detect and help resolve supply chain issues.

Next Generation sequencing (NGS) has been introduced in recent years as a very powerful method for species identification in food products. However, the use of NGS requires the development of the correct workflow to ensure the reliability of the results and to maximize the advantages of this high throughput DNA-based method. Taking advantage of the non-targeted and massive sequencing output obtained by NGS, a workflow was developed and tested to identify meat and fish species in food products.

The workflow was defined and optimized to meet the following criteria: (i) barcoding of several specific DNA regions suitable for species identification (multi-barcoding); (ii) definition of consensus primer panels producing very small amplicons (multiplex) to ensure the use in highly processed food where DNA can be highly damaged; (iii) optimization of the Ion Torrent™ technology (Ion Chef™ System and Ion GeneStudio™ S5 System, Thermo Fisher Scientific); (iv) development of a software for automatic data analysis containing suitable databases with thousands of meat and fish species for species identification.

This presentation will feature the advances in applied, effective genomic approaches at correctly identifying the species present in all the food samples regardless of their processing treatments. It will give an insight into non–targeted methods and provide information on rapid methods suitable for uptake by industry and is commercially available by Thermo Fisher Scientific.